Cassandra Lewis fights to save her family's Colorado home from foreclosure

Cassandra Lewis, known in her community as simply 'Miss Cassandra', is fighting to save her family's home of 20 years from foreclosure. After falling behind on their mortgage payments, Cassandra and her family fell victim to a scam, giving tens of thousands of dollars to a company called 'Keep My Homes Solutions' who promised to help them do just that. Instead, Keep My Home solutions took their money, leaving them under the threat of foreclosure by HSBC bank. Cassandra created a campaign on Start2.occupyourhomes.org to build support nationally in her fight to save her home.

Her petition tells her story:

My name is Cassandra Lewis, but everyone calls me Miss Cassandra. My family is about to lose our home of 20 years due to a scam and we need your support! I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama during the time of the Civil Rights movement. I was ten years old when the four little girls were killed by white supremacists in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I have been sharing my experience of growing up in the south during the Jim Crow era and have been educting my community about the importance of voting, being active, and getting involved.

As a young adult I moved to Denver, Colorado. For the past 20 years, I've been living in a modest two-bedroom house that my daughter bought for $43,000. Over the years, this house has been a refuge for many struggling friends and family members in need.

We regularly made our monthly mortgage payments for 13 years. However, in 2005 we went through a rough economic time as so many families have experienced in the recent years. We were unable to make the full payments. We were approached by a company called Keep My Home Solutions. They claimed they could help people like us keep their homes when things were rough.

My daughter met with some representatives of Keep My Home Solutions and they told her we could refinance our mortgage with them. We would make our monthly payments through them instead of paying our lender directly. The only catch was that my daughter had to agree to be co-owner of the house for two years. They said they could help her clean her credit during that time and that at the end of the two years, the property would be transferred completely back to her name. They assured us that this was not a scam and we trusted them and signed a contract in 2006. We simply didn't know what else to do.

Trusting Keep My Home Solutions was a terrible mistake. They turned out to be a complete scam! Despite repeated requests, they never sent us a copy of our signed contract. From 2006 until 2009, we made monthly payments of nearly $1200 directly to Keep My Home Solutions. During this time, we kept in contact with them, and they assured us that everything was going as planned.

However, in 2009, we found out that HSBC Bank was foreclosing on our home. To this day, we don't know what happened to the three years worth of mortgage payments. The only thing that is clear is that Keep My Home Solutions never paid our mortgage and never intended to help us; they simply stole our home and our money.

HSBC Bank is still trying to foreclose on us. They say the only way for us to keep our home is to get financing through another bank for $170,000 with a 20% down payment. This is simply impossible for us. We are unable to afford lawyers to defend our case. We purchased our home in 1993 for $43,000 and paid our mortgage for 13 years. We then paid Keep My Home Solutions for 3 more years and now we are told we have absolutely no equity in our home and that we must give the bank $170,000 to buy our home back!

If we lose our home, my brother, grandson, and I will have nowhere to go. I fear we would become homeless. I am sick with Multiple Sclerosis and my brother is a cancer survivor. We are both on fixed incomes.

Please sign our petition to demand from HSBC Bank that they honor the illegality of the transfer of our home. Our Homes should be given back to our family. Keep My Home Solutions should be criminally charged for their fraudulent activities and return the $80,000 in equity they took from my family. What happened to us in unjust and we need to do something to prevent this from happening to other families.